Fear filled her small face as she nodded slightly. “I don’t care. It would have been a worse Hell to live, knowing I’d been a coward. That I hadn’t tried.”
I knew her words to be foolish, but her bravery threatened to reduce me to tears. Useless tears. I’d cried for centuries, and no one had heard me.
No one had come to save me.
I almost left the stable. I had already turned away, when the bodice of her summer dress slipped to one side, and a part of her bony chest was revealed.
Sweet Maker, what was that? I raced to her, blasting the shadows away with a surge of my twisted soulfire, and lifted her in my hands. “It’s not possible,” I whispered as I felt our connection. But the proof of what had called me here, to her, was before my eyes.
The feather I had sent through the Well of Souls—my last plea for help before I succumbed to despair—lay embedded in the center of her chest. Gavriel’s feather, that he had given to me as a final gift.
It pulsed and gleamed, and I felt the gossamer thin thread of my own soul that I’d attached to it like a kite string, the merest whisper of my innermost self that I could draw out, humming the first notes of the song I’d sent. The hymn of salvation. I knew, if Gavriel heard it, he would know what I was asking.
For him to storm the Abyss and pull me out. Use the power and might of Sanctuary as the weapon it could be, and free me from my prison.
How had that feather become inextricably melded with this young soul’s essence? I examined it closely, slowing time so she would not perish, and so the shadows would not approach while I pondered.
This small child, with no knowledge of her own importance, her role, could not be Gavriel’s soulmate. But she was. Which meant he would come for her. Soon. Gavriel Lightbearer would never let his fated love perish on Earth.
But he might not come in time, I realized. Already, the shadows were tearing through my power. They had the right of it. Her soul belonged to them; the imbalance insisted on correcting itself. I had to save her. Had to do something.
I stared at my hands, at the smutty shadows roiling beneath the skin, the sins I’d taken into my own being in an attempt to heal the Abyss, before I understood what needed healing wasn’t inside that void. Or not only there.
The imbalance had changed my form, as the sins of lust and greed, pride and avarice, sloth and wrath and envy created a foul coating that became a second skin, flexible but inhabited by fragments of suffering souls. Moving shapes under my skin, faces crying out in horror. I could hear them if I listened, though I usually chose not to. My surface covered, it had gone on to add protrusions: horns, a tail, claws, even a hideous, forked tongue. I had become a part of the Abyss itself.
The child’s soul in my hands sputtered, flickered. Flared one last time. The answer was there, in my skin. It was abhorrent to me, though. To allow one so fragile, a soul so bright, to be damaged in this way.
I would bear it if I could. I had taken on far worse. But the imbalance was already attached to her soul, and she had one foot in the Abyss. I studied the smut that was already weaving its tendrils into her spirit, dimming her inner light.
There was one way her soul could remain intact and unblemished, by surviving inside a shell of violation and misery. It was the same path I had discovered, centuries ago, using the power of the Great Sacrifice.
The only way to keep her light from succumbing to evil would be if she chose not only to take on the burden of the murder she had committed, but to make a sacrifice at the same moment, and take on the imbalance of the man’s crimes as well.
The flare of the selfless act would repel the shadows. Her body would perish, but her soul would remain. I could hold her together in the void, remake her if necessary, as long as the core of her light stayed unchanged. I had been a gifted Maker once, after all. I had created Sanctuary.
I could do it, keep her from being unmade by the pain, but the cost to my own reserves would be punishing. I wouldn’t be able to watch over her on Earth once I’d used my power to heal her. But I could send her back, and surely Gavriel would find her soon, before she had to suffer again.
Perhaps he would even feel her suffering now, and rescue her… rescue us both.Please, Mother, let him save us.
“Little Sacrifice, do you want to live? To protect others like your sister?” I asked, feeling sick as the child nodded earnestly.
When it was done, and she was weeping from the agony of taking the imbalance into herself, I held her on my lap, sang the first lullaby I’d ever written, and waited for Gavriel.
“But you never came.” A muddy tear slid down Rafe’s ruined face. “Not that time, or the next, or the dozens afterward. For centuries, I had to watch her die, over and over. Coax her to take on more smut than should have been possible. Comfort and heal her in the void, and use my last scraps of strength to push her back into the only realm I could, with the gate here left uncared for. I burned with shame, but she did it cheerfully, spinning pretty lies for herself that she was some kind of superhero. Whenall she was, was… what did you call her? Oh yes.Trash.” His grip grew less tight, as if his strength was being drained.
I shook my head. “She was never that. When she went to the Celestial Realm with Mik and Righteous, she?—”
He hissed, that strange forked tongue darting out as if to taste the air. “What did you say?”
“A Celestial Messenger got through at last. Haneul. She took Feather, her mate… herothermates. They left only hours ago.”
He bared his teeth. “You’re certain she’s alive?”
I met his gaze. “She was. She could still be.”
“Fuck,” he said flatly, and dropped me. He leaned against the wall, one of his batlike wings extending the width of the hallway. “Gavriel, you idiot. She can’t be apart from you. She’ll—” His words were interrupted by a loud buzzing that came from somewhere else in Sanctuary. We both turned, focusing on the sound.
“The Maker Hall,” I murmured. “Something’s wrong. Something’s coming.”
